Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

The University of Otago Centre for the Book is
pleased to announce our sixth annual research symposium. In 2017, we are
teaming up with Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature to offer a 3-day extravaganza
engagement with books and culture.

The Centre for the Book Symposium will start on
Tuesday evening, November 28th, with our usual public lecture at the Dunedin
City Library. The lecture will feature Warwick Jordan, proprietor of Hard to
Find Books, talking about his wide experience as a bookseller and the variety
of book users that he supplies.

The symposium proper will take place on the
University campus all day Wednesday, November 29th, at the College of Education
and will feature a slate of presentations on the theme “Books and Users.”

The two-day UNESCO Creative Cities symposium
will follow, with international and local keynote speakers on Thursday November
30th, followed on Friday by facilitated workshops at the Dunedin Athenaeum in
the Octagon.

Please note: Thanks to generous support from
the University of Otago Centre for the Book, the NZ National Commission for
UNESCO and the Dunedin City Council, both of these events will be free to
attend, with delegates responsible for providing their own lunch. Delegates are
welcome to register for specific days or all three days.

The theme for the Centre for the Book 2017
Symposium is “Books and Users.”

Before the advent of electronic text storage, a
whole realm of print existed to record and store information. From instruction
manuals to phone books and encyclopedias, these publications were to be
consulted rather than read. Today, increasingly, many of these works are no
longer printed on paper. They are instead disseminated to users in electronic
formats, often only when they are requested. This shift in media has made
readers more conscious of how they use books. It also raises questions about
which sort of books work well in electronic format and which do not. This
symposium seeks to investigate all the ways people use books, not just
consciously or as intended, but for any purpose. Some may be propping up an
item of furniture in the corner; some used for artistic design; some for
elegant wallpaper. Even those books that are actually read are used in many
different ways: for self-exploration; for escape; for gifts to others; for
inspiration. And there are the readers, an equally diverse lot: some fold down
corners; some write in books (some even in ink); some insert all sorts of items
such as bookmarks or for storage; others handle a book so delicately that a
second reader cannot tell the book has ever been opened. Indeed, in medical
contexts, ‘users’ may refer to those in control of their habit or to those
harmfully addicted. Is this also true in the book world? Traditionally,
libraries recorded the frequency with which books were used. Today, especially
because of increased privacy concerns, such information is less publicly
available, but is still being used. Indeed, publishers often place restrictions
on how many times an e-text may be loaned. Institutions face pressure, often
having to buy another copy after the set number of loans has been reached. The
variety of uses for books and of users of books creates areas both of mutual
benefit and of potential conflict. The codex is a superbly efficient and highly
evolved technology with a well-established set of design conventions that
permit quite distinctive uses. Change is in the wind, and the book beyond the
codex is evolving in new directions, some of which will no doubt succeed and
others of which are bound to fail.

Call For Papers

All of these topics are of potential interest
for the Centre for the Book symposium. Whether you are an adept or an addict, whether
books for you are primarily physical, spiritual or cerebral, and whether you
prefer to look up information online or in print, you undoubtedly have thoughts
on this topic. So please email a 250-300 word abstract of your ideas to books@otago.ac.nz and set aside the end
of November for a thought-provoking few days of reflection and engagement with
books and users of books. In short – sharpen those pencils!

The Booksellers Association has called for delays in financial
support to bookshops to be addressed "urgently" after it has
emerged many small businesses are still waiting for help with
soaring business rates.

Hay Festival's first weekend has kicked off with a host of
events featuring writers including Colm Tóibín, Helen Fielding and Stephen
Fry who discussed issues such as using flashbacks in writing, criticisms of
anti-feminism and "aggregating news agencies" such as Facebook.

Yorkshire-based indie press Bluemoose Books is offering the
opportunity for five new writers to be published in a short story
collection alongside its leading authors Andrew Michael Hurley, Carys Bray,
Paul Kingsnorth, Peter Kalu and Kirsty Logan.

Indie
House Rides the Pulitzer Wave
Seattle-based poetry publisher Wave Books is seeing a surge of interest after
one of its titles, 'Olio' by Tyehimba Jess, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
this year. more »

Ann Birstein
Dies at 89: The memoirist and novelist often wrote of her roots
as a New York rabbi's daughter and turbulent marriage to critic Alfred Kazin.

Two Canadian
Publishers Merge: Breakwater Books has purchased fellow
Newfoundland and Labrador company Creative Book Publishing, nearly doubling its
number of titles.

Remembering
Gwendolyn Brooks: In 1950, the poet became the first
African-American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Her reputation has only grown
since.

A Golden Age for
Dystopian Fiction: What to make of our new literature of radical
pessimism, in which liberal and conservative dystopias battle in proxy wars of
the imagination.

What Maya
Angelou Taught Me: "It wasn’t until Maya Angelou died that
the full story of her life opened up to me, and helped me open up my own,"
Kyla Marshell writes.

National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson, "whose novels and short stories about the fallen--junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad--emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose," died May 24, the New York Times reported. He was 67.

Although Johnson published a book of poetry, The Man Among the Seals, at 19 and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Iowa, "addictions to alcohol and drugs, including heroin, derailed him.... Johnson initially believed that sobriety would damage his creativity, but later realized that his addictions were not fueling much writing.""I finally figured it only meant I'd be writing three paragraphs less a year because I'd only written two stories and 37 poems in almost a decade," he told New York magazine in 2002.By the early 1980s, "he was sober and had begun a prolific few decades, turning out novels, plays, poetry and journalism," the Times noted. His books include Angels, Jesus' Son; Tree of Smoke, which won the 2007 National Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Train Dreams, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer; Nobody Move; and The Laughing Monsters."Denis was one of the great writers of his generation," said Jonathan Galassi, Farrar Straus & Giroux's president and publisher. "He wrote prose with the imaginative concentration and empathy of the poet he was."Alex Bowler, his U.K. publisher at Granta, called him a "singular writer and author of at least two immortal masterpieces.... His writing was so vital and distinct. It never patronized the reader and was work of such sympathy and energy. He was a genius."In a New Yorker magazine tribute, Tobias Wolff wrote: "I need hardly say that his is one of the most distinctive voices in our literature, and that he has written work that will abide--Angels, Fiskadoro, The Incognito Lounge, Jesus' Son, and more. That voice, though--the inventiveness and exactitude and dark underlying wit, sometimes flowering into startling bloom, as when the mad, drug-addled orderly Georgie, in the short story 'Emergency,' having been asked what he does, replies, 'I save lives.' "

Issue 118 of New Zealand Books Pukapuka Aotearoa
offers an alternative view of Hera Lindsay Bird, and a rereading of
Lloyd Jones by Hamish Clayton. We examine the past and future of local
journalism, the legacy of Lindauer, and Labour Party politics, led with
a new poem by C K Stead.

“If a library is just where a society keeps its books, then it’s easy to see why many people no longer perceive libraries as relevant. In the days of yore, a building full of books was a clear metaphor for collective knowledge. But today, knowledge is no longer bound to the printed page, and electronic and non-textual forms of media proliferate. Our cultural knowledge is no longer represented primarily as text within books. Moreover, with the internet, we can access our multimedia cultural knowledge from virtually anywhere.”

Unlike many great twentieth-century writers, who saw truth in despair, Milosz’s experiences convinced him that poetry must not darken the world but illuminate it: “Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.”

“A cognitive scientist looking at [scholar Stephen] Booth’s explanation of Shakespearean effects would spot many concepts from her own discipline. Those include priming – when, after hearing a word, we tend more readily to recognize words that are related to it; expectation – the influence of higher-level reasoning on word recognition; and depth of processing – how varying levels of attention affect the extent of our engagement with a statement. (Shallow processing explains our predisposition to miss the problem of whether a man should be allowed to marry his widow’s sister.)”

Talk about unlikely places! “Written at the start of Plath and [Ted] Hughes’s relationship in autumn 1956, the two unseen poems were deciphered from a carbon paper on which Plath had also typed up a table of contents for Hughes’s groundbreaking collection The Hawk in the Rain.”

Whether we like it or not, books about the rich and powerful
always seem to hook us from the start. There’s just something, perhaps, about
sitting in a crowded subway car, reading about a world where people travel by
private plane, where charity balls replace book clubs, and where drama is
just as prevalent as designer handbags. Here are 11 of our favorite
economically escapist reads. READ
MORE

Divya Sawhney has been promoted to vice president for strategy and
corporate development at Penguin Random House.

PicksThe Costco Pennie's
Pick for June is Before
The Fall by Noah
Hawley.ObituariesSportswriter Frank
Deford, 78, died on Sunday.The author of 20 books, he was a
longtime contributor to NPR.Brian Doyle,
60, died on Saturday. He was the author of Mink
River and Martin
Marten, among others, and editor of Portland Magazine.

BooksellingPolitics and
Prose in Washington DC will open a new location in the Union
Market district. Additionally, it will be "phasing
out its involvement" with two store locations within Busboys and Poets
Restaurants in the city. The new location will open this fall.Otto's
book store in Williamsport, NY has been
sold to Kathryn Nassberg and her husband, Isak Sidenbladh, as Betsy Rider retires
after 60 years at the store. "The staff will stay on and the location will
remain the same," Nassberg told the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. "We
will work hard to ensure that Otto's remains the book-lover's paradise that
everyone knows and loves."

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

The $100,000 Michael King Fellowship has been given to award
winning author and composer Dr Phillip Norman to create a history of New
Zealand composers and their work from the start of European settlement to
present day.

Christchurch-based Dr Norman will use the fellowship to
complete a lifetime of work studying New Zealand classical music identifying
influential composers, works and performances, and tracing key developments
through the decades.

“In the 1890s, when composer Alfred Hill was influential,
concert goers would queue for hours to hear his latest work performed,” Dr
Norman said. “Music was the primary form of entertainment so people were
hugely interested in anything new and there was a great depth of activity and
performance.

“The type of music composed also changed over the decades.
The formation of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO) in 1946 inspired
orchestral and instrumental composition. Prior to that people mostly composed
for choirs, individual singers or pianists because that’s who the performers
were,” he said.

The book will provide a greater understanding of the
country’s composers and their sounds, achievements, preoccupations as well as
the challenges they faced. It will complement Dr Norman’s biography of
Douglas Lilburn: His Life and Music, which won a Montana Book Award in
2007.

Creative New Zealand chief executive Stephen Wainwright
said, “Dr Norman is a leading scholar who has the skill to write an
authoritative as well as highly readable account of the people and music that
made an important contribution to the country’s arts, cultural and social
history”.

Dr Norman has compiled three editions of the Bibliography
of New Zealand Compositions including biographies of some 120 New Zealand
composers and descriptions of 4000 of their works.

He has co-authored, edited or contributed to numerous other
books and publications on New Zealand music. From 1980-1991 he was the
principal music reviewer for The Press in Christchurchwriting
more than 700 reviews.

In addition to being a writer Dr Norman has composed more
than 250 works, from orchestral, chamber music and opera through to choral
works, musicals and ballet. He composed music for Footrot Flats, New
Zealand’s best-selling musical, and for the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s
successful Peter Pan, which is shortly to receive a repeat season in
Perth, Australia.

Established in
2003 and administered by Creative New Zealand, the Michael King Fellowship was
renamed in recognition of the late Michael King for his contribution to literature and
his role in advocating for a major fellowship for New Zealand writers.

The fellowship is available to established New Zealand
authors of any literary genre with
a significant publication record. It is offered biennially for writers working
on a major project which
will take two or more years to complete.

New Zealand non-fiction writers, including those
who write for an education audience, are invited to apply for a grant of
$25,000 from Copyright Licensing New Zealand (CLNZ).

The CLNZ Writers’ Award
is offered to writers of any genre of non-fiction, including education works.
The award enables the successful applicant to devote time to their writing
project.

The
CLNZ Writers’ Award is one of the projects made possible through CLNZ’s
Cultural Fund. The Cultural Fund’s objectives are to:

Protect - writers and publishers’
ability to earn revenue from their works

Support – the creation and production
of new works and assist the commercial success of New Zealand works

Grow – the number of works created and
skills in the industry

We encourage non-fiction writers to consider
applying for this award.Applications
for the full range of non-fiction genre are welcome.Applicants must be New Zealand citizens or
permanent residents and writers of proven merit.

Applicants must submit
details of a planned project to a selection panel.Applications must be received by 4pm on Friday 9 June 2017.

Full
application details for the 2017 CLNZ Writers’ Award are available on the
website:www.copyright.co.nz